Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Enough with the soup plate already!

I'm on vacation. I was thinking before this week started that I'd go to goodwill a few times. I want some new dishes. Not square ones, I've figured out that it's really hard to photograph a square plate up close without making it look super weird. And not green ones, because I like my food to have lots of green things in it, so green dishes usually look boring. Blue dishes always look nice, because there's really not a lot of blue food out there, but I've got blue plates already.

Maybe some oblong dishes, or triangle shaped ones? Purple would be nice... I don't think I want any of those things that look like they were imported by the cubic yard by a shady taiwanese businessman, but I think I want a bento box. And maybe some little-old-lady glass dessert plates, something that looks like a tea party.

But then the weather turned out to be totally fantastic, and I've decided that I can go shopping any old time. So I went to the zoo, and to Oaks Park, and the Rhododendron Garden, and dishes will just have to wait.

Meanwhile, I found this growing in my strawberry pot:

It's an oak seedling. There are no oak trees on my porch. Last fall, I received several visits from what I started thinking of as the Kamikaze Squirrel. I didn't want it to start thinking that my flowerpots were a good place to go rooting around, so I chased it off. I figured it would leave the way it arrived, by sneaking down the wall of the building, but no, it gave me this boogle-eyed look and did a belly flop off the balcony into the grass. Four stories down. I wish I'd gotten a video of it doing that, because it made a hell of a whomp when it hit the ground. And then the dumb thing came back the next week and did it again!

At any rate, I can't grow an oak tree in my strawberry bucket.

I also found these in my bag of compost-

They really were impressive. The big one was larger than my hand. Sometimes I wish I had the means to actually compost things myself, but then I realize that a) I am too lackadaisical, and b) I don't actually want to make myself odious to my neighbors. So I think I'll just buy a little compost from people who know what they're doing.

I've decided that annual plants are a nuisance. I think I'd better stick to perennial herbs, for the most part. As you can see from the picture at the top, my sage and rosemary plants are doing very well. I've also got a whole row of mints and strawberries that keep coming up with very little effort, although I couldn't resist starting some nasturtiums and pea plants. Maybe if I get very ambitious, I'll try to grow a blueberry plant sometime.